Give Mail.app a three-pane view

For those of you longing for the often-requested three-pane view in Mail.app, Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings has dug up yet another stellar find: an actual working version.

This Ars Technica forum thread begins with the typical "gee, it'd be great if..." post which oh-so-often yields productive results such as the screenshot you see in this post: a hacked version of Mail.app with a three pane view. Fortunately, this hacked version of Mail.app has a different name (MailWidescreen) so you don't have to bite your nails over whether to overwrite your original Mail.app. Still, it would be good practice to back it up anyway for good measure.

Personally, I think the three pane view in email apps is one of those needless 'change for the sake of change' developments that seems to have oozed out of an admittedly old email UI industry. Email subjects can be pretty useful and revealing, while most emails are never long enough to warrant all the space a three pane view gives to the message, and this view seems to enhance both of these complications: subjects are cut short, while white space is wasted on typically short emails. Just note Exhibit A - this post's screenshot.

With my $0.02 out of the way, however, check out the forum thread for details on this hack's development, or simply use the direct link to the .ZIP file right here.

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Source: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/830094523…

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For those of you longing for the often-requested three-pane view in Mail.app, Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings has dug up yet another stellar find:...

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Mark

People call it Mail App because Mail is such a generic word.

June 21 2006 at 10:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

thomas_h

yeah why do people call it mail.app? it sounds ridicolous, its like windows people calling outlook "outlook.exe" call it Mail or Apple Mail instead.

June 04 2006 at 8:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Adrian vG

It's only nescessary if you get 100 important mails per day. Even at 1680*1050 I prefer only seeing about 5 rows of the mailbox, and the rest is the message window. This was a good idea, but takes up too much space. It's like the qeustion why people maximize the web browser windows when most web pages only are 800 pixles wide.

June 03 2006 at 5:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

sage

perfect! I've been waiting for this. That's why I switched to Thunderbird. Three-column view is absolutely the best layout for dual monitors. Inbox on one screen, messages on the other... sweet optimized real estate!

June 02 2006 at 8:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Chartier

To those wondering why some websites write 'Mail' as 'Mail.app': go try running a search for topics about Mail by using just the search term 'mail' and see how many results are actually on target. ;)

I completely agree, the name of the app is 'Mail', but in hopes of simplifying searches and helping people find what they need, the term 'Mail.app' is a bit more on the money.

June 02 2006 at 1:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris E

Love it, love it, love it!!

June 02 2006 at 12:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

so good! thanks.

June 02 2006 at 11:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Greg

This totally makes up for my wasted time with monolingual yesterday!

Everybody needs this.

June 02 2006 at 11:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Darren

This does not work on 10.4.6 on an iMac Core Duo/Intel. It tells me to get a version that will work with 10.4.

June 02 2006 at 10:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply